As the originator of the “Iran Oil Bourse” I hope you can spare me some space to comment in relation to Ms. Berg’s recent articles.

The original concept five or so years ago was not of an “Iran Oil Bourse” but of a “Middle East Energy Exchange” providing a new Gulf benchmark price which would not be manipulated by investment banks and oil traders – as is the case with the North Sea “Brent” crude oil complex and has been for at least 10 years.

It makes no sense at all – and never has – for crude oil coming out of the Gulf and going to the Far East to be priced against a North Sea benchmark – but Brent has always been used since it is the “least worst” solution.

From personal experience – including very high level conversations – I think that there is no prospect whatever that Iran would unilaterally attempt to create a crude oil benchmark contract whatever currency it may be priced in. A domestic market in products, petrochemicals, and so on, is another matter.

The current global market in oil is owned, controlled, and operated by intermediaries for their own benefit and is fast deteriorating – as I warned it would five years ago – into an “ICE-bound” (ICE = Intercontinental Exchange, currently completing an audacious but brilliant strategy by applying the coup de grace to NYMEX) global monopoly extracting ever increasing profits at the expense of producers and consumers. Barclays Capital recently estimated that intermediary profits from commodity markets (of which energy is a huge component) will double to $26bn in the next three years.

Moreover, this market is now awash with hedge fund money, and despite Ms. Berg’s confidence in NYMEX and IPE/LCH, I believe that these centralized institutions face little-appreciated systemic risks as “single points of failure” in the face of the unregulated, opaque, and massive off-exchange, or “OTC,” market in energy and energy derivatives.

The difference between the LTCM near-meltdown in the financial markets and an energy market crisis this winter or next is that the Fed can’t print oil to bail out the system.

In relation to clearing, Ms. Berg is unfamiliar with the concept of a “Clearing Union” because no partnership-based “enterprise model” (i.e., legal and financial structure) enabling one has ever existed. Naturally, market users would have to back up a mutual guarantee in some way, whether through margin, collateral, or otherwise.

It’s just that there isn’t the “central counterparty” Ms. Berg is used to.

In a nutshell, I believe that the future lies in the creation of a neutral global oil trading network and “Energy Clearing Union” owned by ALL market constituencies: and this concept is beginning to get across. Certainly the Norwegians were interested in it: “Norwegian Bourse Director wants oil bourse priced in euros” – a development which followed a paper I submitted at the request of their consul-general in Edinburgh.

~ Chris Cook, formerly a Director of the International Petroleum Exchange and now a member of the Wimpole Consortium tasked with creating an energy exchange for Iran

Antiwar.com letters page with reply

I had a phone interview with Google today. I took notes; some of the questions they asked were interesting. We were allowed to ask questions. The interviewer didn’t ask many questions in response to my answers, except to occasionally say “interesting”. There’s almost certainly more than one answer to each of these, and a few are probably wrong answers or could be improved in some way; I only include my answers for comparison. Any intermediate questions that I asked for clarification or otherwise have been omitted.

Without further ado, a few of the more interesting ones:

Q: “You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?”

(my answer): Take off all my clothes, wedge them between the blades and the floor to prevent it from turning. Back up against the edge of the blender until the electric motor overheats and burns out. Using the notches etched in the side for measuring, climb out. If there are no such notches or they’re too far apart, retrieve clothes and make a rope to hurl myself out.

My answer: go down to the base of the blades and duck. Mixer blades in blenders normally have a gap underneath them, and in some blenders, the blades are curved. You could survive for a long time crouched down there. With your fingers in your ears.

Q: “How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?”

(my answer): Instantiate a local variable. Call another function with a local. Look at the address of that function and then compare. If the function’s local is higher, the stack grows away from address location 0; if the function’s local is lower, the stack grows towards address location 0. (If they’re the same, you did something wrong!)

My answer: The last time I programmed in Assembler was 1979.

Q: “Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.”

(my answer): A database is a way of organizing information. It’s like a genie who knows where every toy in your room is. Instead of hunting for certain toys yourself and searching the whole room, you can ask the genie to find all your toy soldiers, or only X-Men action figures, or only race cars — anything you want.

My answer: A database is like a pack of Top Trumps in its plastic box. Instead of Gumball Cars, Fast Boats or other Top Trumps stuff, you can make up your own deck. You can then do all kinds of Top Trump like things, comparing cards and stuff like that.

Q: “How many gas stations would you say there are in the United States?”

(my answer): A business doesn’t stick around for long unless it makes a profit. Let’s assume that all gas stations in the US are making at least some profit over the long run. Assume that the number of people who own more than one car is negligibly small relative to the total American population. Figure that 20% of people are too young to drive a car, another 10% can’t drive because of disability or old age, 5% of people use public transportation or carpool, another 5% choose not to drive, and another 5% of the cars are inventory sitting in lots or warehouses that a dealership owns but which no one drives.

There’s about 280 million people in the US; subtracting 50%, that means there’s about 140 million automobiles and 140 million drivers for them. The busiest city or interstate gas stations probably get a customer pulling in about twice a minute, or about 120 customers per hour; a slower gas station out in an agrarian area probably sees a customer once every 10 or 15 minutes, or about 4 customers per hour. Let’s take a weighted average and suppose there’s about one customer every 90 seconds, or about 40 customers an hour. Figuring a fourteen-hour business day (staying open from 7 AM to 9 PM), that’s about 560 customers a day.

If the average gas station services 560 customers a day, then there are 250,000 gas stations in the US. This number slightly overstates the true number of gas stations because some people are serviced by more than one gas station. [Actual number in 2003, according to the Journal of Petroleum Marketing: 237,284, an error of about 5%.]

My answer: There are too many gas stations and too many cars in the United States of America.
[…]

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=299692 

Nabbed from this MSN BLOG (wordpress ate the html, sorry):
Why our Government will attack Iran before March 20
On March 20- Iran will do what Iraq and Venezuela were PREVENTED from doing by U.S. Interference.

“On the start of the Iranian New Year- March 20, 2006 on our calendar, Iran intends to open its own commodity market for oil and gas. This new bourse will be similar to markets in NY and London with one critical exception…

Trades will be conducted in Euros, not dollars.”

from www.isecureonline.com/reports/mtr/emtrg206/home.cfm

This is why Dick Cheney and the Bush administration are rushing to validate some kind of attack on Iran, not the supposed Nuclear capability. It’s another red herring to prevent an Oil power from going Petro-Euro on the U.S.Dollar. Ever since Nixon refused to pay Gold in exchange for the Dollar, The American dollar has been been backed by an agreement with OPEC to price oil exclusively in U.S. Dollars. So in effect, Oil backed the U.S. dollar since that time.

This is one of the primary reasons Foreign countries like China have been hoarding U.S. Treasuries for the past 20 years. At this time last year, China was spending 7.8 million an hour, 187 million a day, buying U.S. treasuries and dollars and holds in excess of 120 Billion in U.S. treasuries, not to mention what the Saudis own as well.

This is the ONLY reason our economy HAS NOT Collapsed into a major recession for the past ten years. The foreign money has been propping up our economy as we rack up record National Debt and Trade deficits under the “Conservative” policies of the Bush administration.

Saddam threatened to pull the plug on the U.S. dollar in 2000 and we ousted him. Venezuela’s ambassador spoke to Russia of doing the same in 2001. Within a year there was a coup attempt against Chavez, reputed to be supported by the CIA. The coup failed, but Chavez pulled back against moving to the Euro.

……

File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4758636.stm

Someday I may publish a history of how OSx86 was originally hacked to run on PCs.
[…]

Yet why aren’t we dual booting already? Money. Most of you are undoubtedly aware of “The Contest,” a 12,000 dollar pot that will be going to the first person to provide a viable dual booting method to the site’s owner. Also note the “onmac” network – and advertisements – that the contest has bequeathed to the once minimalist site as well… another interesting commentary on money.

[…]

he problem with the contest is that it encourages poor geeks (like me) who could use the extra cash (like me) to try their hand at fixing the problem. In theory this would speed up progress. But in fact it’s had the opposite, somewhat paradoxical effect – it’s slowed things down.

[…]

It’s all quite predictable – nothing is getting done because the sharing of information has stopped. Were there no contest, IRC channels would be full of dedicated developers sharing what they’d learned through trial and error, swapping ideas and encouraging each other. I’ve talked with some people who are very close to success… but their efforts are not public. As it stands, sharing what you’ve learned could cost you $12,000

OSx86

This is exactly what is happening to the patent system in general and what has already happened to copyright (especially in realtion to DRM). People are putting an artificial value on the use of ‘their’ ideas and any utilisation of those ideas is being seen as a loss of revenue even when they have notmade any attempt to implement those ideas themselves.

The flow of ideas is steadily being dammed and innovation stymied for the sake of a few bushels of wheat.

Someone clever said:

It’s NOT stealing you fascist brainwashed cocktards! Stealing is me coming and nicking your car. To make a real world comparison, ED2k, BT etc… Is the equivalent of me making an exact duplicate of your car, without depriving you the use of it. So keep your real world bullshit comparisons to yourself.

Up the end of the 1970’s, the BBC used to regular pillage their archives for tapes and wipe whole chunks of shows. To fill the gaps in the archives, especially for their radio, they’ve used off-air recordings of shows. Copyright violation, clearly, that ultimately has proven beneficial.

What I find hilarious is the amount of stuff I’ve downloaded, that I’ve ultimately wound up buying. Had I not had the opportunity to do so, I would never have bought it. I own 200 DVD’s. A clear third were bought after downloading them first.

Reminds me of an old episode of a show called “Tales of the Unexpected”. It was from when i was quite young. This guy resurfaces his basement while his wife is away. His friends spend the whole episode saying “You buried your wife down there didn’t you? You killed her and you buried her.” For the whole episode, they’re on and on and on at him. Very much like the **AA constantly calling P2P users thieves… So at the end of the episode, what does he do? His wife returns, he digs a hole in his new floor, kills his wife, and buries her. He was brainwashed into it by his friends constantly badgering him. Eventually the lie became the reality.

You think that with the fucking industries saying we’re all pirates, that they aren’t basically causing people to say.”Well fuck it then” and fulfilling the lie?

And all you butter-wouldnt-melt-in-their-mouths types… You’re all fucking hypocrites. You ever taped a song off the radio? Photocopied anything?

Plus, all you hypocrites, care to explain how me taping a show off TV and giving it to a friend is ignored, but me capturing the show and letting the friend download it makes me akin to Satan?

From Digg

MPA press release provided to Slyck.com:

“Razorback2 was not just an enormous index for Internet users engaged in illegal file swapping, it was a menace to society,” said Executive Vice President and Worldwide Anti-Piracy Director John G. Malcolm. “I applaud the Swiss and Belgian authorities for their actions which are helping thwart Internet piracy around the world.”

“ The MPA and its member companies, working with the local film industries, have a multi-pronged approach to fighting piracy, which includes educating people about the consequences of piracy, taking action against Internet thieves, working with law enforcement authorities around the world to root out pirate operations and working to ensure movies are available legally using advanced technology. “

Somehow, it appears to me that they have totally lost the propaganda battle. Everyone that matters understands that copying files is not in any way stealing, and each time the MPA, MPAA, RIAA take down a part of a service, it acts as a vaccination to the services, causing them to become stronger and more resistant to attack.

These attacks. and the infantile press releases that accompany them are the death rattle of these dinosaurs.